As readers, we are accustomed to reading stories of war & injustice from the victims' point of view, sympathising with their plight. In Detective Story, the tables have been turned, leaving us in the mind of a monster, as Nobel Laureate Imre Kertész plunges us into a story of the worst kind, told by a man living outside morality.

Now in prison, Antonio Martens is a torturer for the secret police of a recently defunct dictatorship. He requests & is given writing materials in his cell, & what he has to recount is his involvement in the surveillance, torture, & assassination of Federigo & Enrique Salinas, a prominent father & son whose principled but passive opposition to the regime left them vulnerable to the secret police. Preying upon young Enrique

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A devastating analysis of America's political actions (as opposed to its rhetoric) before, during & after the Cold War. Using secret National Security Council planning documents & taking post-war Europe & Central America as paradigms, the author examines America's aggressive colonialist policy. It draws alarming connections between its repression of information inside the U.S. & its aggressive empire-building abroad. ...

The year is 1095. The most prominent leaders of the Christian world have assembled in a meadow in France near Clermont. Pope Urban appeals for the liberation of Jerusalem & cries out Deus lo volt!, God Wills It! The cry is taken up, echoes forth & is carried on. Wave upon wave of Christian pilgrims rush to assault the growing power of Muslims in the Holy Land & will do so for the next two hundred years. Most able men become soldiers of the Cross, & when a man is prevented by old age or ill health, he sends his son. Women, too, go to fight alongside the men. It is a time of great adventure, of great exploration & cultural change. Uniting Christian Europe in a common cause, the crusades defined forever the spirit of the West.A magisterial recounting of this great & terrible campaign, Deus lo Volt! tells with stunning immediacy one soldier's first-hand experience of the defining war of Christendom. ...